This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Saturday, January 30, 2016

Latino School Segregation: The Big Education Problem That No One Is Talking About

As is indicated in this piece, it is interesting that there isn't much of a discourse around school segregation in the Mexican American or Mexican-origin community. My parents' generation growing up in West Texas was definitely aware of segregation. Heck, crossing the railroad tracks to the other side of town risked life and limb. For the guys, forget dating the white girls. You could get beat up or killed for doing so.

I'm sure that school segregation was easier to see back then because it aligned to segregation and discrimination in other areas like hotels and restaurants where your money as a Mexican wasn't good. All the way through the 1940s and 1950s, there simply weren't jobs for Mexicans. The majority survived by going on the migrant stream. This, of course, took the children out of schools for several months out of the year.

Despite this lack of an explicit discourse today, I am regularly told by many of my students at UT from South Texas or certain places in San Antonio that they didn't realize that schooling was different in other places: It's what you are used to and come to expect—unless, of course, you find yourself outside of this environment, invariably representing a wake-up call for them.

As our students acquire a more critically conscious perspective, that's when they begin to connect the dots with respect to the politics and policies pertinent to public education, how schools get funded through property taxes, together with histories of redlining, racial covenants, housing discrimination, loan
discrimination, gentrification, displacement, and the like.

It doesn't have to be this way, but you pretty much have to go to college to get to this place of understanding the history and context of Latino school segregation. So if our communities seem to not have an opinion, well, they've been schooled in such a way that they're NOT supposed to have one—to have a standpoint. From a majoritarian standpoint, the degree to which the masses of brown and black people do not evolve this consciousness, all is good and well in America.This (mis)education of an entire community into a narrowed sense of its own possibilities leaves in tact current constellations of power and with that, our highly unequal status quo.Angela Valenzuelac/s

Separate and unequal.

In 2004, student Hector Flores (left) marched through the rain near
Hoover Elementary in California. The walk commemorated Mendez v.
Westminster, the case that led to California being the first state in
the nation to end school segregation.

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Nearly a decade before the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of
Education made segregated schooling of black students unconstitutional, a
group of five Mexican-American families in California fought for
integrated schools in Mendez v. Westminster.
It was 1946. For years, the state's Mexican-American students had languished in inferior "Mexican schools" to which they were assigned based on name and complexion.
Plaintiffs in the case argued that the segregation of Mexican-American
children violated their right to "equal protection" under the
Constitution, noting that their schools were severely under-resourced
compared to nearby white schools, and the plaintiffs' experts testified
on the negative impact segregation has on children's self-esteem.
Defendants in the case -- four school districts -- argued that Mexican
students had poor hygiene, carried diseases and were intellectually
inferior.
The case -- which was decided in the plaintiffs' favor -- never made
its way to the Supreme Court, and thus its impact was never felt on a
federal level. But soon after, California became the first state to ban state-sponsored school segregation.
It's now 2015, and while much has changed in California, much has
remained the same. Segregation is no longer based on official policies
or law -- called de jure segregation -- but based on voluntary housing
or schooling choices. Still, the Golden State remains the most
segregated one in the country for Latino students, according to research from the UCLA's Civil Rights Project, which studies civil rights issues.
To be an average Latino student in California today means that you likely attend a school that is 84 percent
nonwhite, with high rates of concentrated poverty. It means you live in
a two-tiered society where only 20 percent of Latino students taking
the SAT in California are deemed college-ready, compared to 41 percent of students statewide.
California's situation is extreme. Its Latino population is
exceptionally large and exceptionally segregated. But the state's issues
are symptomatic of a long-term, nationwide trend of Latinos quietly
becoming the most segregated minority population of students in the
country, the UCLA center has found.
In 2011, the typical Latino student attended a school that was 57
percent Latino, according to the UCLA research. Comparatively, an
average black student student attended a school that was 49 percent
black. A typical white student attended a school that was 73 percent
white.

Why Is No One Talking About This?

There is a dearth of research on how segregation impacts Latino
students specifically, although there are plentiful data on how racial
isolation impacts African-Americans. As efforts to address
African-American segregation have faltered, public discourse on growing
Latino segregation remains elusive.

“Schools that are integrated better reflect our values as a country.”John King, U.S. Department of Education

"We’ve been through a demographic revolution with almost no policy
attention to the racial dimensions of these changes," Gary Orfield,
co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, told The Huffington
Post. "It's not exactly true that anyone is paying attention to black
segregation either -- we’re a third of the century into kind of doing
nothing and a quarter of the century into systematically dismantling
what we did earlier."
Little attention has been paid to the issue of Latino segregation
because segregation has historically been a black-white issue, said
Patricia Gándara, Orfield's co-director at the Civil Rights Project.
Brown v. Board of Education focused specifically on African-American
students. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruling in Keyes v. School District
No. 1, Denver, Colorado, recognized that Latino students also have a
right to integrated schools, but the case had minimal impact. When
African-American and white students were being bussed away from
their neighborhood schools to help achieve racial balance, Latinos were
mostly ignored.
"We’re stuck in a black-white paradigm that doesn’t work quite the same way for Latinos," Gándara said.
Jennifer Lee, an associate professor of sociology at the University
of Indiana, predicts that in the coming years, we will start to see more
research about the schooling of Latino students.
"With this increase in the Latino population I think there are lots
of scholars who are very interested the Latino student community. It
just takes time," she said. "We can't extrapolate studies on
African-American students to Latino students."
With little research on the topic, it is difficult to come up with potential fixes.
"We have to really understand what it is we’re studying," said Lee.
"We can't assume the mechanisms are the same across different
populations -- or all Latino students."
David Garcia, an associate professor at Arizona State University, ran
for the state's superintendent of public instruction in 2014 and lost.
During his campaign, he did not hear the issue of school segregation
brought up once, he said, "not even by minority groups."
"The entire discussion from how we come to study it really comes out
of the South and in the '60s and blacks and whites," said Garcia.
Meanwhile, Western states -- those that typically have some of the
largest populations of Latino students -- are studied less frequently.
Research on the issue of Latino school segregation is also somewhat
complicated by the diversity within this group of students, Garcia
noted. Latino students may experience segregation differently depending
on when they came to this country or where their family is from, for
example.
"I think first and foremost in the conversations I've had, people
want to know how Latino students are doing" in school, Garcia said. "Who
they are attending with does not rise to the level of public
discussion."

AP Photo/Gosia Wozniacka
In this June 26, 2013, photo, students eat lunch during the school's
summer program at Jefferson Elementary School in Sanger, California. The
Sanger Unified School District, which was once named as one of the
lowest-performing in the state, is now known for its success in
educating its predominantly Latino student body: It graduated 94 percent
of its Hispanic students in 2012, 20 percent more than the state
average.

It is now impossible to ignore the role that Latino students play in
the issue of school segregation. If King does focus his attention on
school diversity, it is likely that the issue of Latino segregation will
receive more attention than it ever has before.